Empire Online reports that Neil Marshall, director of "Blackwater," is returning to helm the season four finale, which will feature the Battle for the Wall. If that's all true, they may be shuffling the order of events, or Jon's election as Lord Commander may be held off until season five. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's some miscommunication, and the episode is climactic, but not the actual finale.

Edit: Winter is Coming has been told by its own sources that the report is "not entirely accurate."

I imagine that Stoneheart's birth will be the last moment of episode one next season. I doubt Arya's warging will play a part, though perhaps Nymeria will make a brief appearance leading them to her?

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I tend to doubt they're actually going to show Stoneheart's birth. I thought they were, but I think the place to do that was the finale.

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I thought so too, but I wonder if they will keep her low-key throughout the next few seasons. Had they introduced her now, I think casual viewers would expect her to be a major part of the plot going forward. But as we know, she starts off as a rumor, a shadow, quietly picking off the Freys.

The amount of screen time Mance has is in line with his appearances in A Storm of Swords, which are memorable but pretty minimal.

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In the books, the first time Jon sees Mance he approaches the gruff Tormund instead because Mance is a campy bard and not what he expected a warrior to be like. In the show they KEEP Jon mistaking Tormund for Mance but it's completely pointless as it's just Jon mistaking a gruff guy for... another gruff guy. I have no fucking clue what the point of that scene was in the show.

In the book, Mance expresses sadness for Halfhand's death. In the show he's delighted and offers to shake Jon's hand for it. The character is completely dumbed down.

We're going to get two more years of Cersei and Margaery exchanging veiled threats before anything actually happens between them.

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In A Feast For Crows, Margaery isn't a schemer. Cersei's insanity, motivated by Maggy the Frog's prophecy, leads her to assume Margaery is an ultra-manipulative schemer when she's really not up to much. In the show.. Margaery is exactly what the ultra-insane Cersei thought she was in Book 4. They've completely missed the point, so it won't be nearly as interesting. Cersei will come across as sane and rational.

It's just Benioff and Weiss putting stuff from the books on screen without thinking about how it conflicts with their interpretation of the characters. Like when they use Stannis/Davos dialogue about duty and good not outweighing bad, even though TV Stannis doesn't care about those things. Or the Cersei/Robert scene from season one, which ("seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind" notwithstanding) is well-done in its own right, but hard to reconcile with the characters' other actions.

In A Feast For Crows, Margaery isn't a schemer.

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Which is not to say that she's not clever-- she's certainly working to ingratiate herself with Tommen, and I think generally she knows more than she lets on. But the overtly manipulative TV version is definitely something else altogether, another example of the show's utter lack of interest in women who don't fit the feisty "Strong Female Character" mold.

Margaery in the books was a conspirator in Joffrey's murder, so I'd hardly call it a big change to portray her as a schemer. She's definitely more forthright, but I think that's partly another instance of a character being aged up.

Not true! They made Sansa token dumb blonde . She's been rid of all character development! Hopefully they do her Eyrie plot right.

So, I'm re-reading A Dance With Dragons for the first time since launch week. I've powered through A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows over the past month and a half or so, I lent A Game of Thrones to a friend around 2 years ago and didn't get it back so will probably end up finishing my marathon with it.

A Feast For Crows benefits HUGELY from a re-read. I was frustrated at the time because of the lack of plot progression, especially in early Brienne chapters. Now that I knew what I was in for going in, I really, really loved almost the whole book.The moody, melancholic atmosphere was beautiful. Jaime's confrontation with the Blackfish was a classic ASOIAF moment, as was Doran's final line.

I'm finding A Dance With Dragons to be problematic. I'm REALLY enjoying the Theon, Bran and Davos chapters. Theon's chapters in particular are incredible, and up there with the best of GRRM's writing.

Tyrion's chapters are kinda a chore though. On first read through I didn't mind the Tyrion chapters as much because I assumed it was leading us to a meeting between him and Dany. Since I know this plot just kinda.. fizzles out it's frustrating a lot of the time and slows down the book. The chapters are well written (Though I'm so fucking tired of "Wherever whores go...") and I like the idea of having this long journey to calm Tyrion down after all the rage he'd built up but I don't think it quite worked. There's too many of these chapters and they kill the pacing of the book so far, though I'm only nearing the end of Part 1 (I'm a Brit!).

I really love the atmosphere of Feast too. It has obvious structural flaws thanks to the various reconfigurations of the overall story, but as you say there's something mournful and eerie about it, as a moment of potential rebuilding declines into further conflict and magic slowly creeps back into the world. Even Maggy's prophecy, which I know a lot of people don't care for, works for me in that respect.

The Tyrion chapters in Dance are a problem. There's something to be said for the psychological progression there, but I think Martin got too drawn into the Essos world-building involved, and let it expand an already languorous arc.

There are just way too many. Bran has like.. 3 chapters the whole book and Sansa got cut completely. Those are 2 of my fave 5 POV characters in the series, along with Jaime, Arya and Theon. Tyrion isn't a favourite of mine (Though I still like him a lot!), and spending so much time with him is irritating. I don't hate the Dany chapters nearly as much as fandom does, but I'd agree they were too numerous.

The 2 least interesting plots dominate the book. I find myself praying the next chapter is a Reek one whenever I'm on a Tyrion chapter now. The best antidote.

It's weird. For all the complaints about the pace of the last two books, some characters have fairly tight storylines. More happens, in terms of character development and plot progression, in five chapters of Arya and three chapters each of Bran and Sansa, than in twelve of Tyrion, thirteen of Jon, ten of Daenerys. Sometimes you can see the justification for the bloat. The Jon and Dany chapters (and Cersei in Feast), even though there still may be too many, are about emphasizing how complicated medieval leadership is, the many factors a monarch or a Lord Commander has to deal with. It needs to be big, so you can see why it might become too big. And the Brienne chapters, which I know a lot of people despise, are about continuing to show how war (and now peace) have affected the common people, and about Brienne's ongoing education in the cruelty of her world. (That will make no sense on TV, of course, since TV Brienne is already hard-edged, another stock Strong Female Character rather than Sansa with a sword.) But Tyrion... even allowing that he needs to be kicked around a bit more to build up the viciousness he's going to display when he gets back to Westeros, that doesn't take twelve chapters.

Brienne's first few chapters are way too slow but they pick up a lot in the second half of A Feast For Crows. The Quiet Isle chapter is absolutely beautiful. I thing Aeron Damphair got too much page-time, but I thought he was a good character and unjustly hated by fans. Victarion was awesome, and Euron was fucking awesome. Aemon's slow demise best evokes the feel of the book in my mind. It's very drawn out, slow and saddening. I like books like that.

A Dance With Dragons is good but it lacks the strong atmosphere of A Feast For Crows. I know Martin felt like he was giving the audience what they wanted with huge amounts of Tyrion and Dany in the next book to compensate but really, Alayne's chapters in the previous book kick them in to the dust.

In terms of atmosphere, I think the only real successes in Dance are the later Theon and Asha chapters, when winter has set in and both Stannis' camp and Winterfell are closed off, paranoid, and riven by internal conflicts. Gorgeous stuff, really, and one reason I'm looking forward to what winter will do to the tone of the southern plotline in the remaining books.

For all my bitching about ADWD, I rate the Theon plot in Book 5 as among the VERY best material in ASOIAF. Probably above anything in Book 1, actually.

I loved Theon in A Clash of Kings a lot because it was refreshing having a POV character that was such a dick (He's WAY softer in the show!), but I never felt much sympathy for him as he made a long series of mistakes, never learning and was doomed from the start. In A Dance With Dragons his plot completely broke my heart. "My name is Reek. It rhymes with freak." I also found Ramsay hilarious. I love it when he has a go at Theon for eating rats legally owned by Roose.

Really like the guy playing Ramsay in the show, even if he's nothing like the one I imagine or read.

One of the main things about how many people reacted to AFFC is that it came in the middle of a decade-long wait. If it had come out two years after ASOS, and with a timely followup a few years alter, I don't think some people would have been as disappointed (the same factors apply to many parts of ADWD). As well, AFFC dumped two whole new sets of POVs into the story when people really wanted more information on preexisting main characters who were omitted. I read them at the same time, so that really didn't apply to me. AFFC is the superior book, to me; there's far less fat.

Nonetheless, this is one area where the TV show could actually improve it, because there's more than enough material there for a really strong season (with a bit of spillover into the preceding and succeeding years).

Also, part of the reason the Tyrion chapters became harder to read in ADWD was because it was becoming more and more clear that Tyrion wasn't that likeable anymore. And in fact, he may have never been that likable on his own to begin with.

A large part of Tyrion's appeal (aside from the hilarious lines he got) was that all the characters around him were such 1-D asshats (Cersei, Joffrey, Pycelle, etc) that we enjoyed him being the one character who regularly humiliated and opposed them and could get away with it. His nasty behavior to them was welcomed and appreciated.

In ADWD he's no longer around them, and the folks he's nastier to are more likable and/or have done nothing to gain the audiences' contempt. So you begin to realize that this is probably how he'd come off in real life and it's not so likable anymore since he see him being equally a jerk to normal folks.